The floor of the Moscow Metro with a sweet candy coating. It's irreverent, cogent, and produced by contributers who are Eurasian area specialists.
Just because the Kremlin denied it does not make us wrong.

Jan 22, 2010

Why am I so in love with ranking systems? I don't know. I just am. The Heritage Foundation recently released its rankings for economic freedom throughout the world in 2010. Here we go.

The failures? No surprises here. Turkmenistan came in at #171, beating out the likes of Zimbabwe and North Korea. Surprises, the rest of Central Asia did better than Ukraine, which came in at #162. Uzbekistan is more free (economically) than Ukraine.

Successes. Well no country from our region came up as "free", but in the "mostly free" category: Estonia (#16), Georgia (#26), and Lithuania (#29). These countries beat out some of the big dogs including Norway and France. Good work!

Good work if you agree with the economic views of the Heritage Foundation, that is. You don't have to be a tyrant-loving fellow traveller of Cuba and North-Korea to believe that while it may be good to rank somewhere in the upper half, you probably don't want to go all the way to the top of this particular list.

I do love rankings too, though. They just pull you in, no matter what the subject.

On a procedural note, meanwhile, do you guys have something against links? You keep reporting these interesting tidbits, but never link to the actual report you're discussing - so if we want to see for ourselves we have to first go a-Googling. Never seen that on a blog!

Case in point: here is a link to the actual ranking, and at the top of the list are (1) Hong Kong and (2) Singapore. Chile, a country with one of the very widest gaps between rich and poor in the Americas, comes in at (10), while mellow Sweden has to make do with a ranking at (21). Botswana comes in higher than Belgium, and El Salvador higher than the Czech Republic, Norway and Spain.